May 06, 2013

﻿﻿Video and objects from my ongoing unmonumental project will be included in ‘Memphis Social’; an unmonumental book will be made available to coincide with the exhibition, as well as a selection of unmonumental multiples. More info at http://unmonumental.org

Memphis Social
draws upon a “social turn” in contemporary art and performance that has
influenced curatorial criteria for some time now. In her 2006 essay,
“The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” art historian
Claire Bishop critiques contemporary, “socially engaged” practices as
being philosophically based in a neo-Platonic idealism which proposes
ideal solutions that don’t reflect contingent reality. She explains
that this attitude generates, “homilies (that) unwittingly push us back
towards a platonic regime where art is valued for its truthfulness and
educational efficacy—not for inviting us to confront the more
complicated considerations of our predicament.” Bishop observes how
contemporary artists have responded to this tendency, writing, “Instead
of extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and fusing
it with social praxis, the most interesting art today exists between two
vanishing points: “art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art.”
While Bishop addresses artists’ strategies for making relevant work, the
philosopher and cultural theorist Jacques Ranciere positions both
artist and audience as “emancipated spectators” jointly
escaping the hypnotic trap of the mediated spectacle. Ranciere suggests
that we not merely react to what he calls “partitions of the sensible”
that perpetuate a fractured sense of society, and that a refusal to do
so might lead to a more profound experience of both aesthetics and
ethics. Memphis Social seeks to combine, and critique, both of
these ideas in an exhibition that examines how to present artwork that
is truly socially engaged with its environment and audience. The project
is a temporary intentional community of artists and cultural
organizations gathered together to form a contingent society that
addresses combined aesthetic and ethical concerns.

My experience curating Memphis Social has
placed me unequivocally on the ground, tasked with negotiating both
public and private concerns in presenting a show that mixes discrete
works of art and social performance with community organizations in both
institutional and non-institutional settings. This alternative model
for an exhibition creates its own, often unpredictable, dynamic and I
have needed to be ready with a contingency plan at every turn of events,
often navigating the boundaries between the public and private.
Maintaining this permeable grey area between private and public might be
seen ineffective when attempting to initiate social movements or
galvanize political change, but I have found it to be quite practical
and humane in its open-ended and non-ideologically driven way of being.
The risk of losing one’s private aesthetic stake is taken on the chance
that its public enactment is integrally connected to its share, not in
historical time, but in ethical contingency. The actual social can
therefore be seen as differentiated and cohesive, not
necessarily toward a historically determinist normalization, but toward
an awareness of an organic continuum of both liminal and embodied
agency.

While the balance between public and private has been
important to my personal experience curating the show, it has also been a
critical part of how the exhibition has come together in relation to
its physical presentation. One of my goals in organizing Memphis Social
has been to present a wide array of artists as a group ensemble in
gallery spaces at the Memphis College of Art, and also individually in
alternative locations and public spaces throughout the city. As curator I
have worked to problematize “the partition of the sensible” head on by
literally displacing many of the artists and their works to locations
less ideologically determined than the typical institutional venues.
These diverse locales include Marshall Arts, Caritas Village Community
Center, and Crosstown Arts—an art center housed in an old Sears
warehouse—and many of these locations feature new, site-specific work.
Each of these organizations helps to focus social activity and serve
communities in real need of coalescent civic centers. The curatorial
intention behind presenting art, dance, and musical performance at these
locations has been to augment what already takes place there and to
offer an objective acknowledgement of their significance to the Memphis
communities that they serve. In addition to these alternative spaces,
the exhibition is also sited in specialized institutions such as The
Cotton Museum, which was the location of the commodities exchange for
the crop that defines the South in its agrarian economy and also links
it, inescapably, to the history of slavery. The screening here of Kara
Walker’s 2005 video 8 Possible Beginnings, along with a
collection intervention by the younger, Memphis artist Lester
Merriweather, brings to the fore (in this institutional partition) the
explicit and implicit national assumptions of economics, labor, and
race.

Other participants in Memphis Social such as
Tim Rollins and Doug Ashford, represent artists responsible for setting
the standard of socially inclusive presentations of aesthetics and
ethics in their work as respective members of Group Material
(1979-1996). An older generation of artists in the exhibition—Leon Golub
and Nancy Spero—extrapolated idiosyncratic imagery from their social
experiences in addressing the Vietnam War, Central American death
squads, and contemporary feminism. Their work draws attention to what
Ranciere has called “allegories of inequality” in social perception.
Singular individual vision in the ensemble is represented by the work of
the pioneering photographer William Eggleston, who has created a
lyrical documentation of the remnants of the Old South in and around his
home in Memphis. Younger artists in the show such as Mark Tribe and
Chelsea Knight examine the contemporary social phenomena of militia
groups in their collaborative work in progress, Posse Comitatus.

While rooted in Memphis, the exhibition brings
together artists from such diverse backgrounds and experiences as Tracey
Moffatt from Australia and Alexandra Kostrubula from Sweden, and
presents the work of artist collectives such as Bullet Space from
Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The nomadic nature of contemporary art is
underscored by the inclusion of artists such as Virginia Overton,
originally from Tennessee but currently situated in New York City, and
William Pope L., born in New Jersey but now living and working in
Chicago. For Memphis Social Overton is contributing a large
site-specific work, which will be presented on a pair of outdoor
billboards located across from Marshall Arts; a selection of Pope L.’s Failure
drawings will be presented at the Hyde Gallery at the Memphis College
of Art. Aviva Rahmani has charged her art with an environmental
awareness in restoring wetlands habitats near her home in Maine. She
brings this practice to bear in her participation in Memphis Social
with a work that interprets the degradation of the Mississippi
watershed. My own orientation in the Northeast has, to a certain degree,
effected an itinerant defamiliarization and dislocation in my
curatorial perspective in Memphis encounters. Artists based in Memphis
such as Greely Myatt, Dwayne Butcher, Anthony Lee, and Haley
Morris-Cafiero each in their own way interpret both the universal and
specific aspects of the life in the city. Myatt is known for his public
works that draw upon the history of art and aspects of folk culture. His
Rockers sculpture, presented in Memphis Social at the
Hyde Gallery, employs a ubiquitous signifier of Southern culture, the
rocking chair, in a way that both charms and undermines viewer
expectations. Dwayne Butcher also references Southern social stereotypes
in his rhetorically succinct paintings like You Can’t Be The Fat Redneck Forever. Anthony Lee’s work, The Reclamation of Color,
addresses shades of perception in skin tone colloquially used in the
Black community to designate social status. Morris-Cafiero’s photographs
such as Swing Set, also on view at the Hyde Gallery, examine the social
dynamic of body image in contemporary culture. These artists’ works
speak to the broad aim of the exhibition because of their ability to
draw from localized experience without being limited to it. This
“de-territorialization” of a sense of place in individual and collective
experience is also an important subtext of Memphis Social.

Memphis is a place, which, like many others, becomes
universal in its specifics. The city is a locale, vicariously known and
practically experienced. It is important to the world at large that
Memphis is a birthplace of the Blues, yet more locally, the blues still
lives there. Its being the location of Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination is significant to the wider public, but in a local
context, the struggle for racial and class equality continues. Memphis Social is
not ostensibly about Memphis, but the city as a specific environment
has proved fertile ground to explore socially engaged artwork. The site
of “the social” is a moving target that can pop up in the most
unpredictable places. Organizing Memphis Social has taught me
to re-orient my own position in ways I couldn’t have rightly mapped. The
artists and cultural practitioners I have chosen as my guides to wend
my curatorial way through Memphis Social play with sometimes
blatant but often subtle relations of the aesthetic and ethical. The
meaning of the exhibition is contained in their diverse experiences of
these relations.